How to Improve Call Center AHT: Full Guide

The easy calls are disappearing. According to Verint's State of Agent Experience 2026 report, 94% of agents expect AI to change their roles within three years, and 61% expect to handle more complex and technical work as a result.

Think about what that means for the support operation you run. Password resets and balance checks go to the bots, while your agents handle complex cases, frustrated customers, and longer calls.

All of this pushes Average Handle Time (AHT) in one direction: up. And if AHT is one of the metrics your call center lives by, you're now managing a number with natural upward pressure.

The old tricks for shaving seconds no longer work, and pushing agents to wrap up calls backfires regardless of whether customers get the help they need.

Still, AHT can come down even as call complexity goes up. In this article, we cover what AHT is, how to calculate it, and how to improve it without sacrificing support quality.

What is AHT in a call center?

Average Handle Time is a customer service metric that indicates the total duration of a support interaction from beginning to end. It reflects the entire operational effort involved in handling a support request:

Talk time: The minutes an agent and a customer spend in a conversation
Hold time: The time the customer spends waiting while the agent looks something up, consults another team, or processes a request
After-call work (ACW): The invisible tasks that happen after the customer hangs up, like logging notes, updating records, or sending a follow-up email

Each component is a different lever to pull. Cutting unnecessary hold time improves the customer experience, while streamlining after-call work helps agents move on to the next person faster. Shortening talk time also improves efficiency, as long as the customer still gets what they came for.

That last condition is the one to watch. A low AHT driven by agents rushing customers off the phone shows up later as repeat calls, escalations, and customer churn, all of which cost far more than the seconds you saved.

The goal, then, isn't the shortest call possible but the shortest call that fully resolves the issue. And since AHT alone doesn't tell you whether that's happening, you have to monitor it alongside:

First Call Resolution (FCR): Resolving the customer's issue on the first contact
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): How satisfied customers are with the service
Quality Assurance (QA) Score: How well agents follow procedures and deliver quality service

AHT isn't limited to calls, by the way. While it started as a phone metric, it's no longer confined to one. Most teams now track Average Handle Time across every channel they support, including email, live chat, and social media.

How to calculate AHT

The standard formula is:

Average Handle Time = (Total talk time + Total hold time + Total after-call work) ÷ Total number of calls

Add up every minute your agents spent talking, holding, and wrapping up over a given period, then divide by the number of calls they handled in that same period. The result is your AHT, expressed in minutes and seconds.

Say the support team at an insurance company handled 1,200 calls last month. Agents logged 7,800 minutes of talk time, 1,400 minutes of hold time, and 2,800 minutes of after-call work:

(7,800 + 1,400 + 2,800) ÷ 1,200 = 10 minutes

An AHT of 10 minutes might alarm a retail support operation, but for an insurance team focused on improving the customer experience, where agents guide policyholders through claims and coverage questions, it could be perfectly healthy.

The number only means something against the complexity of the calls behind it, which varies by industry, call type, channel mix, and even how much your self-service already deflects. Recent benchmarks show just how wide the industry range alone runs:

Industry	AHT benchmark
Retail and ecommerce	3 to 5 min
Financial services	Around 4 min 45 sec
Travel and hospitality	5 to 7 min
Healthcare	Around 6.6 min
Utilities and energy	6 to 8 min
SaaS and tech support	7 to 10 min
Telecommunications	8 to 12 min for technical calls

The takeaway: benchmark against your own industry and the types of calls your team handles. Once you know where you stand, use the strategies below to reduce AHT in your call center without cutting corners.

How to improve AHT in a call center

Knowing how to improve AHT in a call center comes down to removing friction at every stage of the call, and sometimes before it ever starts. Here's where to begin.

1. Use skills-based routing to match calls with the right agents

Handle time starts climbing before your agent says a word. If a call lands with someone who lacks the expertise to resolve it, everything that follows takes longer: more hold time, more consultations, and often a transfer that resets the clock.

Skills-based routing fixes the problem at the source. The system reads the issue from Interactive Voice Response (IVR) selections or account data, then matches the call to the agent best equipped to handle it.

2. Give agents customer context before the call starts

The customer explained their issue via chat or on their last call, and now they're explaining it again while the agent hunts through systems for their history.

Context should arrive before the greeting does. When your ticket software automatically surfaces the customer's profile, past interactions, and open tickets the moment the phone rings, the agent skips the interrogation phase and starts the call already oriented.

3. Use cobrowsing to see the customer's screen

A large share of handle time goes to a conversation that shouldn't exist: the customer describing what's on their screen while the agent guesses at what they mean. "Click the blue button. No, the other one. What does the error say exactly?"

Cobrowsing removes this guessing game. The agent joins the customer's browser session in seconds and sees what the customer sees. Instead of narrating, the agent points, highlights, or clicks on the customer's screen.

Troubleshooting that used to take 30 minutes of back-and-forth becomes a five-minute guided fix. In fact, support teams average roughly 43% faster session completion with cobrowsing.

4. Reduce after-call work with AI summaries

After-call work is the part of AHT your customers never see, but your agents drown in. Notes, ticket tags, record updates, follow-up emails: five minutes of wrap-up after every eight-minute call means a third of your handle time happens after the customer hangs up.

If you want to improve AHT in your call center without touching the customer conversation at all, this is where to start. AI can draft the call summary, tag the ticket, and update statuses the moment the call ends, so agents can review and correct rather than write from scratch.

5. Coach agents using real call recordings

If someone on your team ever wonders how to reduce AHT as an agent, the answer shouldn't be a guess or a Google search. It should be sitting in your coaching library, built from calls in your own queue, with your customers on the line.

This library begins with your quickest agents, who already know how to keep handle time low. Review their shortest successful calls alongside your team's longest, and patterns emerge: how top performers open, how they signpost what's coming, where struggling agents lose minutes to dead air or repeated questions.

Then close the loop. Let agents with high handle times hear what an efficient version of the same call sounds like, and give new hires recorded examples from day one. Coaching built on your own calls is better than any off-the-shelf training.

6. Prevent repeat calls with proactive customer education

The cheapest call to handle is the one that never comes in. A meaningful slice of your volume comes from confusion you could have cleared up earlier. A loan application step nobody explains, a patient portal login that changed after a migration, a policy renewal email that raises more questions than it answers.

Your chat transcripts and post-call summaries already show what customers keep calling about. Pull the top recurring reasons, then fix each one at the source. This strategy improves call center efficiency from outside the call center: fewer repetitive calls mean shorter queues, and the ones that remain start closer to the actual problem.

Prevention has a ceiling, though. Complex calls will always reach your agents, and when they do, nothing shortens the conversation like a shared view of the problem.

How cobrowsing reduces your AHT

Cobrowsing compresses all three phases of handle time at once. Talk time drops when nobody has to describe their screen in detail. Hold time follows, since the agent sees the issue immediately rather than hunting for answers mid-call. And after-call work gets lighter because the recorded session already documents what happened.

UserView packs all of that into a browser-based tool, so your agents can:

See the customer's screen in seconds, connecting with a four-digit code, no downloads or external links required
Click, scroll, and type to lead customers past the exact step where they're stuck
Mask sensitive fields automatically, so card numbers, balances, and patient data stay hidden, and compliance never slows the call
Record sessions for QA, training, and compliance review, with every recording available in the session history dashboard
Work inside your existing stack, embedded in Salesforce, Zendesk, or Intercom, so launching a session doesn't break the agent's flow

And if you run a platform of your own, you can build the same capability directly into your product with a cobrowsing API, making visual guidance a native part of your support experience rather than a separate tool.

There's no single trick for improving AHT in a call center; every strategy in this post trims the number in some way. Cobrowsing targets your longest, hardest calls, the ones your team inherits as everything else gets automated.

Book a UserView demo and see how much shorter a complex call can be.

How to Improve AHT in a Call Center: From Routing to Wrap-Up